Beauty is unbearable and drives us to despair, Albert Camus once said, because it offers us for a moment the glimpse of an eternity we would like to stretch out over the whole of time. I was remembering the quote last week on a visit to the Salton Sea, a place where beauty and despair always seem to go hand-in-hand.

Once a glittering oasis set against the Chocolate Mountains in southeastern California, the sea has become a stagnant and toxic wasteland in recent years. Restoration proposals abound, but lawmakers have mostly turned their backs on the sea. As it continues to dry up at an alarming rate—a result of geography, climate change, tough economic times, and ongoing water conflicts—time seems to be running out.

The four-minute exposure shown here was taken near Red Hill Marina on the south shore. It’s part of a personal project I’ve been working on documenting the effects of environmental devastation and decline. For more of my photos, see The Salton Sea: A Photoessay.

Someone once quipped that there’s nothing like autumn in Los Angeles when throngs of tourists come to watch the smog change colors. If the line is funny it’s because there’s more than a little truth to it. Smog is what I expected to see some weeks ago when I took to the skies with my pilot friend, Sam, for a daytrip to the Palm Desert. But it was one of those rare mornings when the haze seemed to lift for a few fleeting hours. As you can see in this photo, we flew just north of the city above the San Fernando Valley. Looking south we could see across the entire Los Angeles Basin. Palos Verde and even Catalina Island were clearly visible in the distance. Aerial photos of L.A. are hard to come by — you need a clear day and a good vantage point. On this particular morning, I was lucky to have both.

Earlier this week I was interviewed by It’s Nice That about my Burning Man photography. It’s Nice That is a beautiful and well-curated art magazine and website based in London. The interview appeared along with about a dozen of my photographs. Since it was edited for length, I’m including the complete exchange below.

You’ve been documenting Burning Man for the last eight years. Why do you find it so compelling to document?

Burning Man is one of the most interesting events in the world, in my experience, but also one of the most difficult to describe. It’s not quite an art festival, not quite a desert rave, and not quite a social experiment, but something of all three. What’s remarkable about it is that it’s organized around creativity and self-expression. The idea is to fully immerse and express yourself in some creative capacity — through building installations, making art, playing music, dressing up, walking on stilts, spinning fire, or simply being beautiful. It means that it’s an endlessly fascinating place where you never know what to expect and surprise awaits you at every turn.

The scale and the ephemeral nature of the event must be hard to communicate to people who haven’t been there.

Yes, there is no way to convey the sheer immensity of Burning Man to someone who has never been there. There is also something rather dreamlike and enchanting about the way it rises out of the open desert for a few brief days only to vanish again after the event is over. Toward the end of the week, much of the infrastructure — including the 40-foot effigy from which Burning Man takes its name — goes up in flames.

Have you noticed it changing and evolving over the years?

When the event got its start 25 years ago, it was little more than a bonfire on a beach in San Francisco. It moved to the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada some years later but was still relatively small and unstructured. For many participants, the appeal of the desert was that there were no rules. If you wanted to shoot guns, play with fire, or blow up cars, there was no one to stop you. But as the event grew, so did the need for order and safety. Today the event attracts over 50,000 people from all over the world. It’s highly organized and tightly run, and perhaps a little less fun. Old-timers complain that the anarchy and lawlessness of the early days has been lost.

Do you recognise people when you go back each year?

Yes, a lot of people return to Burning Man year after year. I’ve developed some quite special and enduring friendships there. It’s also allowed me to explore the anthropology of the event — the way people’s perspectives change over time. This is reflected in some of my photographs of artists and their installations, for example, which show how their creative vision has evolved and transformed.

Would you describe yourself foremost as a photographer or a journalist/writer?

I would say that my journalism takes different forms depending on the nature of the project. I started my career in radio and still think that’s the best medium for conversation and storytelling. Over time I shifted to print and devoted myself more to writing articles and books. Print excels as a medium for presenting facts, analysis, and ideas. In recent years I’ve been exploring the possibilities of photojournalism. Though I learned photography as a kid and studied it in college, it’s only recently that I’ve discovered how powerful it can be.

Burning Man has helped me in that process. When I first attended the event, I was struck by the sheer inadequacy of words. Photography seemed like a more powerful medium for documenting the experience. Photographs convey but don’t interpret. At their best, they are very intimate. They capture the imagination and speak to the heart, but without saying a word.

I’m back from a short trip to Death Valley, a favorite getaway, a place I love to go to quiet the nerves and tame the ego. The place has that effect because it makes you feel inconsequential, helpless, and out of place. It also happens to be a place of spellbinding beauty. Here are a handful of photos from the trip.

In some parts of Death Valley, you feel as if you have the whole place all to yourself.

The play of sun and shadow at Zabriski Point is mesmerizing.

Furnace Creek is an otherworldy oasis in the heart of Death Valley.

Badwater was bone dry this year.

One of the curious moving rocks at Racetrack Playa.

It was my first time at the Eureka Sand Dunes, a magnificent place where time seems to stand still.

The 2006 Burning Man festival kicked off last night in Nevada’s Black Rock desert. In a story today, ABC News described the event variously as “the Woodstock of Generation X,” a “weeklong party for iPod nerds and punk-rock pixies,” and “a massive drug-fueled orgy of the senses.” (Click here for story.)

For the record, Burning Man is not a rock concert, a gathering of techies or punk-rockers, or even a drug fest. That said, Bede Moore, the writer of the ABC story, got much of it right. I’m quoted at one point in the article saying that Larry Harvey and the other founders based the event on a very enlightened set of values. Even though the festival has grown exponentially over the past 20 years, they have stayed true to those values. For many of us, it’s the thing that keeps us coming back year after year.